We were told that when the sins of our forefathers became too much, God decided to flush all living creatures out of the world in a storm, accompanied by a very heavy downpour, of forty days. But He decided to save Noah, his household and different species of animals in His mercy and to preserve propagation. When God’s mission had been accomplished, the scripture tells us that Noah performed a few simple tests to be sure that the storm was truly over and water had receded. He first sent out a raven. Then he released a dove to ‘test the waters’ as it were. But the dove could not find a place to perch. After seven days, he released the dove again. This time, the dove came back in the evening with an olive leaf in its beak. This told Noah that the waters had indeed receded.

I felt like the Biblical Noah recently when CBN’s claim of releasing money into the system needed to be verified. The first sign for me that the cash crunch storm had abated and money was easing into the system came when I went to the fuel station for fuel. Ordinarily, you bought what you wanted to buy and then paid. But with the unavailability of cash and the unreliability of electronic transfer, nobody wanted to take chances. The result is that most stations would tell you to transfer money in advance. It turned out to be just as well this time. I estimated what I felt would fill the tank – a difficult task since fuel prices were still fluctuating depending on where one found oneself. Unfortunately, the transfer did not go through – network and service provider were the convenient and predictable excuses. It took almost the better part of an hour and four different POS machines before the transfer was successful. When my tank was full, it turned out I had overpaid by about a thousand Naira. The attendant stole a look at me and was about to move away to attend to another customer. I quickly offered a deal more in hope than expectation. My deal was that she should give me five hundred Naira and keep the change. To my surprise, she reached into her breast pocket and took out a 500 Naira note. This would definitely not have happened at the end of March. The second testing of waters was when I transferred money to the driver for some stuff. He came back with change in cash. This hadn’t happened in almost three months and it turned out to be my first time of actually seeing a 200 Naira new note. For me, these were my Noah’s test; indications that cash was gradually getting into people’s pockets. It seemed the storm had abated.

Emefiele’s CBN might not have intended to wipe off Nigerians with the storm of the cash crunch which raged relentlessly for about twice the forty days and nights of the biblical deluge. But it was a tsunami that blew into every home and adversely affected Nigerians, especially those at the lower rung of the ladder, in a way that very few things had done. This Easter and the days leading to it, were for many Nigerians, the worst they ever had. The usual Easter celebration disappeared with the significance of Easter especially to the young who see Easter as an occasion for parental lavishness. Now that the waters are receding and we can sight the earth again, it is time to glimpse the bodies and businesses that have been drowned in the storm. They are many. Besides the dead, are some that are trying to raise their heads above the waters; there are some gasping for air who need emergency help; there are some who have taken so much water that their chances of surviving are very slim. There is a report that Nigeria lost 30 trillion Naira in the first quarter of this year alone. That is really half the story for me. We have to situate the report around the lives of daily paid workers; the poor grandmother who sells groundnut at the street corner; the itinerant ‘marketer’ who moves from site to site selling pastries and ‘energy drinks’; the poor families who eat once a day depending on what daddy brings home after the day’s toil; data alone cannot really tell the impact of this recent currency seizure.

I watched a disturbing program on Channels TV a couple of weeks back where a spokesperson for the poultry industry was lamenting the extent of losses the industry was having to carry as a result of the slowdown in the economy. They found themselves contending with increasing cost of raw materials because of unavailability and high transportation costs. These were in addition to poor sales. These were all caused by the harrowing cash crunch. He stated that the poultry farmers had a whopping fifteen million eggs they could not sell. I also saw a clip of a farmer whose offices and workers’ quarters had been converted to ‘warehouses’ for unsold eggs. In two to three weeks, the eggs will go rotten and will have to be buried. Unfortunately, they deal with livestock which means they cannot stop feeding the chickens and therefore, cannot stop producing eggs unless they want to get out of business. This could probably be the lot of many at the end of this experience. Every business has a value-chain. Every value-chain contributes to the economy. When an occurrence like the cash crunch disrupts different value-chains, it disrupts the economy massively. Unfortunately, all of these are coming in the last months of Emefiele’s tenure. There is no time left to make amends and it is certain that the incoming administration will not keep him a day longer than necessary. He will be remembered, in spite of whatever he had tried to achieve during his two term tenure, for unpleasant things like inflation and foreign exchange scarcity and racketeering. Worse, he will be remembered as the man who supervised the sacrifice of the economy on the altar of political expediency. That he publicly acknowledged he did not carry the Finance Ministry along in this destructive journey, is in itself, damning. It means he carries the can alone. Or with his President.

•Muyiwa Adetiba is a veteran journalist and publisher. He can be reached via titbits2012@yahoo.com

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